


Steve and Bucky Attempt Witchcraft to Obtain a Comic Book

by CaptainSteeb



Series: Steve and Bucky Try To Function [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 1920s, Catholic Steve Rogers, Chrismukkah, Corporal Punishment, Gen, Happy Ending, Humor, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Kid Bucky Barnes, Kid Steve Rogers, M/M, Mischief, Present Day Steve and Bucky, Spells & Enchantments, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:41:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24478117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainSteeb/pseuds/CaptainSteeb
Summary: It's a cold, rainy day in Brooklyn and twelve-year-olds Steve and Bucky just finished their last issue of The Amazing Tinboy. Desperate to get the next issue, Bucky bypasses all logical methods and goes straight to a summoning spell out of a creepy old book."Clutching his rosary to his chest in a perfect imitation of his mother, Steve shuffled over to Bucky and sat down.'I don’t wanna summon Satan, Buck. Christmas is in two days.'"
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Steve and Bucky Try To Function [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1765621
Comments: 11
Kudos: 229





	Steve and Bucky Attempt Witchcraft to Obtain a Comic Book

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Стив и Баки заручаются магией, чтобы раздобыть комикс](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29073366) by [WTF Infinity Starbucks 2021 (InfinityStucky)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InfinityStucky/pseuds/WTF%20Infinity%20Starbucks%202021)



Steve and Bucky were bundled up on the floor of Bucky’s room, hovering over a beat-up comic book that Bucky had borrowed from their classmate. They came to the final page and Steve let out a great huff and crossed his arms.

“Now we ain’t even gonna know what happens,” he pouted. “We ain’t gonna get issue 14 unless you steal another one from Jeremy.”

“I didn’t steal nothing from him!” It was a familiar argument: Bucky had approached Jeremy, an eleven year old in the grade below them, about the comic. He had offered Jeremy an orange if he could keep the comic for a “little while”, and Jeremy had agreed. It had been three months since the transaction.

“You said you’d give it back to him and you didn’t!”

“I’m just borrowing it! I never told him how long I’d borrow it for! It’s his fault he never said when he wanted it back.” Bucky flipped the cover closed and leaned back against his rickety bed frame, pulling his threadbare baby blanket firmly around his shoulders.

Steve huffed and puffed for a few more moments, vowing to give the comic back to Jeremy when school resumed, before calming down and leaning against Bucky’s shoulder with a sigh. “So what now?”

“Get offa me, shrimp,” Bucky said, but made no move to push Steve away from him. He sighed and sat in silence for a moment, glaring at the hail pounding on his window, before perking up. “I know!”

“What?” Steve looked skeptical.

“I got a book from the library—”

“I don’t wanna look at no more anatomy stuff, Buck!”

“No, no, no,” Bucky said, turning around to pull a stack of books out from under his bed. A cockroach scurried out and scuttled over Steve’s leg, but he just flicked it off and watched it run over to the door and disappear behind the baseboard.

“You gotta start cleaning more, pal.”

“Don’t give me that shit; I’ve seen inside your desk at school.” Bucky pushed a few books to the side, mainly texts about animals and anatomy and the human body, before revealing an odd-looking dark tome with incomprehensible writing on the front.

“Is that Hebrew?” Steve asked, pulling the book toward himself.

“No, wiseguy. It’s Latin or something, I don’t know. But look.” Bucky flipped the book open and revealed page after page of strange looking symbols, drawings of animals, and jumbled letters in an unfamiliar language.

“That ain’t Latin. I have to learn Latin at Catechism, and that ain’t it.” Steve frowned at the book, flipping through a few more pages, then reeled back when he saw a drawing of a pentagram.

“Bucky, this is devil stuff!”

“No it ain’t, and that shit ain’t even real. Don’t be dumb.”

“Yeah it sure as shit is!” Steve leapt to his feet, stumbled over to his beat up newspaper bag, and dug out a wooden rosary. “Get that outta here!”

“You’re such a goddamned boob.” Bucky waved a dismissive hand in Steve’s direction and hunched back over the book, flipping through the pages calmly. It took a few moments, but Steve’s breathing finally went back to normal and, still clutching his rosary to his chest in a perfect imitation of his mother, he shuffled over to Bucky and sat back down.

“I don’t wanna summon Satan, Buck. Christmas is in two days.”

Bucky ignored him and kept flipping through the book, then ended up on one of the few pages with English words: _Spell to Summon Gifts_.

“Look, Stevie, if we do this, then maybe we can get the issue 14 of Tinboy.” He looked up, steel blue eyes eager. “Don’t you wanna know if Tinboy makes it out alright?”

Steve, lips pursed and eyebrows scrunched together, frowned down at the book, then stared at Bucky for a few long moments. He readjusted his grip on his rosary, crossed himself and said something in Irish, then gave a single firm nod.

“Stevie, you’re the tops!” Bucky pulled Steve in for a noogie, then released him and went over to his closet to shuffle around.

“What are you doing?”

“You gotta get candles to do spells, right?” Bucky asked from inside the narrow little space. “Shut the curtains, it’s gotta be dark.”

“You can’t use your menorah to do a summoning spell, Buck.”

“I ain’t! Jeez, Stevie, you must think I’m a real idiot. I got candles left over in here from last winter, when we didn’t have no light.”

Bucky’s tenement had had their electricity cut off for two weeks last winter. They never found out who did it or why it was cut off, but Bucky’s Pa said it probably had something to do with the Germans who owned the building.

Steve pulled the curtains, which Bucky’s Ma had fashioned out of old flour sacks, over the little window and situated himself back on the floor. The lighting was a dim blue now, and with his poor vision he could barely make out Bucky emerging from the corner of the room.

“Okay,” Bucky said, sitting across from Steve. He placed four candles of various sizes between them, pulled out a box of matches, and promptly burned his finger trying to light the first one. “Sonofabitch!”

“I heard that, James Buchanan!” Bucky’s Ma called from the other room.

“Sorry _Mooooooom_ ,” Bucky drawled as Steve snatched the matchbox away from him and lit the candles himself. Steve’s hands, though thin and bony, were steady and he knew how to light matches properly because of his asthma cigarettes.

“I still think this is dumb,” Steve said, flicking his wrist a few times to put out the match. He put the burnt matchstick aside and snatched up his rosary again. “My Ma would give me such a beating if she saw me doing this. She might _actually_ kill me, Buck, you can’t tell no one about this.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bucky dismissed, eagerly skimming over the incantation. “Oh, we should put something in the middle. A sacrifice, something like that.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “We ain’t _got_ nothing to sacrifice.”

“Sure we do!” Bucky went over to his door, kicked the baseboard, and watched as a few cockroaches came scurrying out. He stomped on one of them a few times with his bare heel, a seasoned move, then stooped down to scoop up the remains and plopped the thing down in the middle of their little circle of candles.

“You’re nasty,” Steve said, but leaned over to peer at the book. “So now we, what, we gotta say those words out loud? I ain’t saying those words.”

“Pansy.” Bucky sat back down and pulled the book into his lap, squinted at the page for a few moments, then began to slowly stumble his way through the spell. Steve tensed up, his back as straight as it could get, eyes wide. He fumbled with the crucifix on his rosary and began to pray under his breath.

Bucky was in the process of saying the last word when his bedroom door opened. Both boys looked over and there stood Winifred Barnes, holding a plate of snacks in one hand and a glass of milk in the other. She blinked a few times, taking in the candles, the book, and the mangled roach.

_“Yakov!”_

Steve cringed over at Bucky. It was always real bad when Bucky was called by his birth name. The last time Steve had heard it was when Bucky had gotten caught with a Tijuana Bible under his pillow, and after that he hadn’t seen Bucky for two weeks.

The whole thing ended up being a bust. Winifred put the candles out, confiscated the book, and made Bucky clean up the dead roach. She then wrote out a long note, pinned it to Steve’s shirt, and sent him home with the promise that he wouldn’t be seeing Bucky for at least three weeks.

When Steve got home, he had a passing thought of hiding the note, but he knew that his Ma would have her ways of finding out, so he reluctantly handed it over to her. He felt the fear of God as she read it, her face going from confused to enraged to impassive. When she looked up from the paper, he couldn’t read her expression at all.

“You got your rosary with ya?” she asked.

“Yes, Mama.”

“No supper.” She pointed at the little sectioned off corner of the apartment that was his room. “You go say one rosary for each Station of the Cross.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“You’re going to Father O’Connelly tomorrow, _on Christmas Eve_ , and you’re going to confess.”

“Yes, Mama.” Steve went to step past her, but she caught him against her chest and held him tight for a moment, then let him go with a swift smack on his bottom.

###

“It snowed that night. My Pa took me down to his shop and made me shovel snow for ten hours straight,” Bucky said around his mouthful of Pringles.

Steve snorted. “You never told me.” 

Bucky huffed a laugh and slid down further on the couch, flinging one leg up across Steve’s lap and almost dislodging his husband’s sketchbook. “I wanted to act tough.”

Tony let himself in a few moments later, covered in grease and hair sticking up all over his head. “Hey sweet cheeks; hey Terminator.”

“Sexual harassment of a coworker,” Steve snarked without looking up from his drawing.

“Ha ha. Anyway,” Tony dropped a pile of books on their coffee table, dislodging the stack of textbooks that Bucky had carefully balanced on there the night before. “Oh, sorry. You know you have a bookshelf, right? Actually, why are you reading books? You can use your StarkReader for these things, you know, you don’t have to—”

“What are these?” Bucky interrupted, sifting through the battered comics. “Comic books?”

“You two said you used to read these, remember? Three movie nights ago, when we were watching The Great Dictator? I figured you’d want a blast from the past for Chrismukkah, so here you go.” Tony hovered for a moment, and when Steve looked up with an earnest smile, he hastily retreated to the door. “No thanks needed. No, don’t give me that look, I can’t handle you.” He whirled around and disappeared out the door.

“He’s so gone on you,” Bucky scoffed, flipping through the comics. “Oh, look, Stevie! Buck Rogers!”

“We’ll have to get him something for Christmas.”

Bucky waved his metal hand at Steve. “I knitted him some socks.”

Steve snorted and grabbed a few of the comics, smiling fondly at the old titles, when he saw it: There, in the middle of their coffee table, was Tinboy: Issue 14.

“Well,” Bucky said after a very long moment of silence, “I guess it took a hell of a lot more than sacrificing that roach, didn’t it?”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and Kudos make me smile! :) Any thoughts on what else you'd like to see in this series are appreciated.
> 
> Edit 7/23: thanks to Yokogreyword for gently pointing out that the word “dumbass” didn’t exist in American slang until the 50’s! Made a very tiny edit.


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